A blog about technologies, science, books and other stuff, especially science fiction

Facebook

Yesterday, when it was early morning in the USA, Facebook started having problems. Suddenly it became impossible to update your status or write anything in groups and pages and even use the “Like” function. Soon, on other social networks, mainly Twitter, messages were posted showing panic but also irony and #facebookdown was very trendy among the hashtags. After a few hours the fault was fixed and the situation slowly went back to normal.

A research carried out at the Free University of Berlin (Freie Universität Berlin) and published in “Frontiers in Human Neuroscience” analyzed the effects of Facebook on the human brain. 31 subjects were examined using magnetic resonance imaging while (MRI) while they watched pictures of themselves or other people accompanied by positive comments.

Following a class action, the U.S. federal judge Richard Seeborg ruled that Facebook will pay a total of $20 million to compensate a group of users. Their faces were used without their consent as testimonials of the advertising program “Sponsor stories” in 2011. However, in the end each of the 614,000 users who entered the class action will receive $15 only.

Almost a year after Facebook’s IPO, that happened in May 2012, the consequences of its debacle are yet to be assessed. Among the reasons for the collapse in the value of the social network’s shares there were technical problems with the Nasdaq platform. Yesterday, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) – the authority which oversees the American Stock Exchange – announced that it approved a $62 million plan to compensate the investors affected by those problems.

Facebook, Amazon and Google joined the association Cancer Research UK providing the resources necessary to create a videogame for mobile phones that’s really special. Its name, at least its working name, is GeneRun and will be userful to cancer research and allowing anyone to examine a mountain of data to find small changes in genes that may cause cancer forms.